


Wisteria

by namio



Series: Zinnia + Azalea [1]
Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: But this fic is basically, Characters and relationships tag will expand as I write, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, The power of friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 07:41:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7675861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/namio/pseuds/namio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after Sorey went to sleep, Mikleo finds himself returning to Camlann again and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wisteria

Almost wordlessly, Camlann becomes somewhat his… ‘domain’.

Nobody says a word about it when it happens, and nobody says a word when he restores the barrier around it the best he can. He doesn’t go too far, and doesn’t stay there for long. He doesn’t visit too often.

Not in the first decade, anyway.

* * *

Two decades: that’s how long it has been since Sorey went to sleep. Mikleo’s been up and about doing various things since then—but Rose has recently retired and so he has, too, and he’s been back in Elysia to… do things. Tidy up the houses. They’ve given him Gramps’ place, too, just because apparently it’s only appropriate. Mikleo doesn’t know if they’re doing it because they think he stands to benefit most from having such an empty memento, or if they’re expecting him to step up to the hole he left behind. Neither option sound pleasing, so he put it out of his mind.

A month in, everything is neat, dust-free and tidy. Mikleo sets off for Camlann. He’s learned quite a few new tricks on the road—things only actual danger could teach, things only running on adrenaline can instil. It’s time the barrier to Camlann gets revised.

It takes him the entire day and half of the night. It’s one thing to make a good, lasting barrier for a party of six—it’s another thing entirely to weave one for an entire area, and by the time Mikleo is finished, his legs wobble dangerously underneath him. He sits by a small creek, joints on his weak arms locking to keep him upright, and stares at the light.

He wonders. He wonders about a lot of thing, in the years away—how does Sorey look right now? Does he continue to grow, or is he suspended in time? Is his body being persevered, courtesy of him being a vessel? Is it even there? Does he look the way he looked whenever he slept, drool and all? Did Maotelus spare him the embarrassment and turned him something as ethereal as the pillar of purity in front of him?

Mikleo knows not to pursue that line of thought, though—not physically.

The wounds still hurt. Mikleo once asked Lailah if there will be a time when he finds years slipping by his fingers to give way to equally speedy, loose decades. All she had to give was a sad look. Part of him wanted to apologize—it was clear that his adrift self had worried everyone, Lailah especially. The other part of him just wanted something—something like certainty. Closure. A clear description of the life ahead, because he didn’t want to plunge into it alone.

“Time doesn’t act simply one way,” she said, breaking the silence moments after his question hung in the air. “It’s a turbulence of everything, stretching and paling and intensifying without care. I’ve lived for a long time, but somehow journeys never failed to feel like they could last forever.”

She held his hands, and he wondered how many times she had to go through this—to move on from a bright point in her life because it simply was a dot in the line that was her time. He wondered how she could accept it and be strong. The campfire casted dancing lights and shadows across her face—oh. Maybe that was how.

“Sometimes I just feel numb,” he had confessed another time. Lailah’s back became straighter and her eyes softened as she gazed at him, so Mikleo continued. “I miss him, but…”

Words don’t do it justice. Actions feel like a pale imitation of what had been. Replacement is an insult. Moving on feels like a crime.

“You will have to find your own answer, Mikleo,” Lailah said, stroking his hair. When had she become so close, and when did she move to hold him? “But we’re always here for you. Whatever answer you arrive to, we support you.”

He had nodded then, and he nods now.

The stars are bright tonight, and earlier today, he noticed the ring of wildly growing pansies around the light. The rich, velvety purple blinked back like curious eyes as he made his round, both deep in concentration and scattered in thought, but he hadn’t the time to take a proper look. Not that he could now, since the sun had already set hours ago, but well—his hand reaches out for a nearby one, and the tips of his finger traces the softness of the petals.

Is this the result of Maotelus’ blessing slowly seeping into the earth? There’s something thrumming and alive in this isolated land; he can feel it sing in the water of the creek. Mikleo’s born in a time when Maotelus vanished, he wouldn’t know. But still, it brings a smile to his face.

After being the origin of the Age of Chaos, Camlann finally regains its chance to rewrite its legacy. The earth thrums in anticipation. The sky stretches above, twinkling with starlight, and peers kindly at the new page of history.

He’s feeling particularly poetic tonight. Maybe he should write.

* * *

The third time Mikleo comes to Camlann, he can immediately tell that something is different.

His barrier isn’t exactly something sophisticated enough to tell him when someone is inside it, but he can tell when he steps onto the grass anyway—there’s a foreign domain here, though it’s tame and weaker than his; not a threat. New, flowering trees dot the landscape, now, and it almost seems to make a path.

Mikleo, naturally, follows it.

It leads to the creek he was sitting by years and years ago. Crystal clear, the water trickles and rushes ahead of each other like racing children, sounds like crinkling papers and laughter. New growth shoots up between rocks and dirt, peering like green eyes, while trees that persevered through the winter hunch over and make the shadows dance, turning the sunlight into something like a kaleidoscope. It’s a new beginning.

“Oh!” a woman says, and Mikleo looks up.

It’s… her. There are really no questions on that front—ever since he learned that humans of pure heart can become seraphim, ever since Sorey went to sleep, he sometimes wonders if she will be one, too. He doesn’t know her, but he knows that she’s pure—there was strength to her that he wanted to have too, back when he first met her proper. She held on to a hope that she could never guess would ever come to fruition, and did so steadfastly. Without being able to confirm and see whether the two hopes she held on to so tightly had created a difference, had survived infancy or not, she believed in them anyway.

It makes him think of Sorey. He could never know whether Sorey’s idea will come to fruition or not, but he wants to have her resolute heart and believe in him anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice soft. “I didn’t realize there’s someone here—there weren’t last time I came by, and…”

“Oh, it’s quite all right,” she says, smiling. With her hair flowing white, tipped with the same brown she had in life, she could almost pass off as his actual mother, now. “I’ve only awakened… recently. In the late autumn, right as winter descended. Are you the one who made those barriers?”

Her hand gestures to her side, sweeping in a vague representation of their surroundings, and Mikleo nods. There’s a dryness in his mouth that water can’t quench, that keeps his lips from moving, and she smiles at him.

“Thank you, then. I had assumed that there’s something incredibly precious here—this light, it’s pure. Though I don’t know what it is, I know that it must be protected until the time comes, so thank you.” She turns, and the pale brown of her dress flutters. Her flared long sleeves are white but they are speckled with earth, smeared with grass and faded by sunlight, but it fits her. An earth seraph. Mikleo doesn’t know her in life, but he supposes that someone who can believe something and stand her ground for so long deserves such steady, strong element. “Would you like to take a walk? Spring has barely come to an end, but I took it upon myself to tend to some of the new trees around. There are plenty of flowers trying to bloom, these days—maybe the insects will come soon.”

Mikleo mutely nods and walks behind her, shifting his journal and bag. His current visit has been one he made for the sake of writing—he has stayed in Elysia for a good decade or two, switching between writing until his hand hurts and helping Natalie develop her martial and seraphic artes until his entire body hurts, and now that she’s out to break away from the idyllic stagnancy of Elysia, it’s about high time he follows suit, too. His first book has been out for a year, now. Rose had insisted he finished the darn thing before she dies, because dangit, nothing like a very long lifespan to tempt procrastination. Mikleo admits that she had a point—it’s been a solid three or so decades. So he got it printed.

Now it feels like this is a new chapter of a new book.

There’s a clearing near a cliff with a gorgeous view of the world below, and they’ve taken to sitting underneath a young tree. His hands are busy with ingredients and glass and spoons instead of a book and a pen, but it’s a nice day for a delicate soft-serve ice cream, too. He hands one glass to Muse and leans back, cradling his own.

“Without an oven or a fire seraph, ice cream is all I can do, sadly,” Mikleo says. “I did have like, four decades to perfect it, though, so I sure hope it tastes good.”

Muse laughs, though a reply is delayed by the fact that she takes some more spoonfuls of the treat instead. “Oh, no! I’ve never been so happy to eat something, and I’ve never even eaten before. This is wonderful.”

Mikleo smiles.

There’s nothing much to talk about, with her young age and his own hesitance in possibly revealing too much, but they don’t need conversations. He tidies up everything and put it back neatly into his bag, and she makes flower crowns. He cracks open his journal and writes, just a bit. They’re mostly loose, pointless pretty sentences—the ends of the words lift off like petals in the wind, blending into the next word over. It’s a paragraph of experience, not thought; the content meanders in peace, content not to impart anything of intellectual value, but something about them reminds him of _now_ , today. She places the crown on his head.

“Pansies,” she says. “They look like your eyes and hair.”

Mikleo has never felt a shortage of parental love in his life—not with Gramps and Medea and Taccio and everyone. Still, something deep in him twinges, and he resigns: something within him wants _something_ ever since Muse died without recognizing him, but this is enough. She doesn’t and most likely will never remember or recognize him as Mikleo, her son, but he has accepted that long ago, and he’s proud of her.

“There’s a village of seraphim just up ahead,” he tells her when the sun is starting to descend into the horizon. “They will be more than happy to have you—they’re a loving folk.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to the world below,” he says, shrugging. “I’m getting angry letters telling me to get my ass to Lastonbell.”

And Ladylake, of course, though Alisha’s letters are far more dignified in word choices. Lailah sent a semi passive-aggressive letter saying just how wonderful it is if he remembers to drop by sometimes, and considering how much she helped him with various aspects of writing the book, he figures he owes her the most. Edna hadn’t sent him anything—of course, since letters meant she couldn’t see the results of her toiling efforts to aggravate. She preferred to annoy him in person. And Zaveid? Well. Who knows what _he’s_ up to, really. Mikleo is sure that they’re nothing good.

“Oh, I see!” For some reason Muse doesn’t comment on the word choices, but Mikleo isn’t about to ask why. “I don’t know, though. I don’t… have memories of who I was—though I have an inkling that I _was_ someone before. I don’t know who. But I know this… this energy. And I know that someday, two children raised by the seraph Zenrus will grow up to be a Shepherd and his companion, and will lead us to a future where seraphim and humans can live hand in hand.”

She pauses, unaware of the coldness creeping up his neck and onto his cheek and the crevices of his mind. “I don’t know how much time has passed, but I know it’s true. There’s something about this light that reminds me of it.” She turns and smiles at him. “I think I might end up staying here, if only for a while longer. There’s hope here, hope that I don’t know if I can find elsewhere.”

Mikleo knows there’s hope here. There’s hope here asleep, suspended in time, that creates new hopes. There’s a hope here that beats like the heart of Glenwood, with heartbeats that lets ripples of hope travel deep within the earth. There’s Sorey.

He wonders if she knows how right she is.

“All right then,” he chokes out. “Be careful out here.”

“Be careful out there,” she says, patting his shoulder.

He leaves under the stars. Up here, the milky expanse above stretches down a path, as though travelling with him. They blink and fade and shine back stronger, but are outshone by the creeping dawn in the horizon anyway. Pink lights soften the blue clouds. He can feel Kyme’s domain fading into Shiron’s, which invigorates the insects and birds and leaves, and the world is alive.

He writes the first thing in the morning, eager to make use of sunlight. The water of the river is cool still on his legs, playful and rushing and tumbling down to Ladylake, and he writes that down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is vaguely inspired by evr's fic where Muse becomes a seraph. The rest, though, is just me wanting a post-canon fic where Mikleo has a lot of people lovingly accompanying and caring for him, because he has a lot of people who loves him and wants to see him happy, even if they might not be able to really do much for him. But for some damn reason, THAT is not the central focus of this. SMH
> 
> I'll still be writing that, though. Just not now.
> 
> Also-- I made a blog for ToZ stuffs (at least for now)! You can send requests or prompts there if you want, but mostly they'll just have some drabbles that might not make it to AO3. Drop by to say hello if you want :'D  
> diatasair.tumblr.com


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